A bunch of people from my life are sitting around in a big, loose circle in a room with a fireplace. I walk in to join them and sit down in a rocking chair and start rocking. When it rocks backwards, it keeps going farther and farther until I flip. I do a balletic move and am unhurt but still embarrassed. Someone removes the rockers from the chair despite my objection, and when I sit in it, I’m too low to the ground. We debate what it means to rock back over a cat’s tail.
My friend from college is there with a young child.
I’m flipping through a stack of photographs, trying to decipher the story they tell. There are beaches and waves but no people, and I can’t tell which place and part of my life is depicted. A family of HMC friends comes into the room, and I go over and sit and talk with them. The daughter, my friend, is there with her little boy. They’ve been planning a big party, and we talk about how it’s going. They ask about my dad, and I tell them of his cancer and chemo and radiation.
I go into the party’s one tiny bathroom and close the two flimsy doors and sit down on the toilet and defecate. I start to clean myself, and there seems to be no end to it– just shit and more shit. I look out the window and a girl from my middle school, now grown to a woman, is there with her husband and is following her little toddler son up a hill. Someone bangs into the outer bathroom door, and I’m alarmed because I’m not finished. They bust in through the flimsy door and stand for awhile outside the bathroom stall waiting. I just sit there, not sure what to do. Eventually the person leaves, and I get up to secure the door. The hook and eye latch has been yanked from the wall, and the plaster is all crumbled away, but I manage to find a place to screw it back in enough to close the door.